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Well, not quite. But it bloody well feels like it.
I hate it when the clocks go back. I can't go to the allotment after work and I get generally gloomy. It's like being a mole for five months.
Now that there's less happening at the plot, I shan't be posting so often. Which may come as a relief to anyone reading this. To kick off the winter 'shit time', here's a pic of me in June inspecting the delphiniums at Wisley. Just seeing those outrageous colours cheers me up:
Now for the hard part: getting rid of all the celeriac. Don't get me wrong. I LOVE it. But the wife gets a bit restive the fourth or fifth time we eat it à la rémoulade, so I have to get creative.
The answer is to add it to gratin dauphinoise. It's easy, delicious and a wonderful way to use up celeriac. Simply slice some potatoes (Desirée works well) and celeriac very thinly. Wash the spud slices in cold water to get the starch out. Pat dry.
Now arrange the potato and celeriac slices in alterating layers in a buttered, oven-proof dish. On top of each layer, scatter a crushed clove of garlic and some salt and pepper. Pour single cream over the whole (stop when the cream level is about an inch below the topmost slice).
Bake for 90 mins at about 150 degrees in the very top of the oven. I put grated gruyère cheese on top 20 mins before I take it out:
Hurrah. The season's first leeks are, at this very minute, winding their way through my digestive tract.
There's a thought for your morning coffee.
These were the biggest, and frankly the only ones worth eating. I'll have to wait for more to mature, but it was worth it. Fresh leeks fried in butter are a delight.
Two gentle ground frosts do not a parsnip make. But hey, sod it. I couldn't wait any more.
These are a decent size, and they were surprisingly tasty (scoffed them last night). Parsnips are one of the few things about autumn I look forward to. That and Vacherin cheese, which you can't buy in the summer months. I have a particularly noisome and runny one in the kitchen, and it's calling to me right now.
May have to slurp some up with a spoon before going to work. Yeah, baby.
Strange things are happening in my garden. It's late October, and we've had a frost. Yet this dahlia is preparing to flower again.
Weirder still, so is my Acanthus. And I've never heard of an Acanthus flowering this late:
It's all jolly... weird. I'm not complaining – far from it. I'm just a tad worried that during the night I appear to have been transported to a parallel universe where things grow in the wrong seasons and the loss of a rugby match causes national mourning.
I mean, come on. Who'd want to live in Australia?
The good news: These winter cauliflowers have grown terrifically well.
The bad news: My total netting solution isn't quite so... total. The bastard pigeons have been sitting directly on the supports and nibbling the upper leaves through the nets.
The damage is only minor. It won't affect the plants seriously. But these flying rats do my head in. I have tried everything – and I mean everything – to keep them off my crops. Nothing is 100% effective.
My latest wheeze is poison. Some French vintners inject 1 in 100 bottles of their prized vintages with strychnine and advertise this with warnings in their cellars to deter burglars.
Is it in keeping with organic standards, do you think, to sacrifice one cauliflower as a deadly meal for these buggers?
I'm gagging to get my teeth into these leeks. I go to the allotment salivating,
hoping against hope that today's the day when they'll be ready. But they're still not quite there.
This is the plant with the thickest stem, and it's still less than an inch in diameter. I can't bring myself to harvest leeks that small.
The parsnips are also keeping me waiting. They're more than big enough, but without frost they don't taste of much. And these days, we don't get frost until November at the earliest.
So it's all rather frustrating.
Pods of lily seeds ripen round about now. I'll harvest this Regale pod today before it cracks and spills its seed everywhere (can I write that on a PG-rated blog?).
Seeds from Trumpet and asiatic lilies are dead easy to grow. Keep them somewhere cool and dry over winter, then sow in pots indoors in February. I fill a big, 8-inch pot with compost, then sow about 12 seeds on the surface and barely cover them.
Put a clear plastic bag over the whole to keep it humid. The seeds germinate in about 7 days. Grow them on until they're ready to be potted up separately or planted outside in April.
I've got tons of regale seed this year. They're forgiving plants and will grow pretty much anywhere, given full sun and reasonably well drained soil. Email me and I'll post you some seed.
If the wretched Royal Mail staff feel like putting in an honest day's work any time soon.
Here's next year's potato bed, cleared and manured. I'll dig it through in November when the soil's cooled a bit and the weeds stop growing.
I'm so paranoid about clubroot that I have a 5-year crop rotation: Potatoes; alliums and pulses; brassicas; roots; sweetcorn and cucurbits. The brassicas always follow the alliums and pulses, because pea and bean roots fix nitrogen in the soil. The root bed is never manured: parsnips and carrots fang on freshly manured ground.
What with the weather, the smell of manure and the shortening days, I'm getting a serious dose of seasonal melancholy. When the clocks go back in a fortnight I'll be totally gutted.
I'm pretty sure I'm doing something wrong with this chicory. But as usual, I don't know what.
I bought these seeds on a whim. Liked the picture (I'm a sucker for this. It brings me no end of grief). Germinated them according to the destructions and planted out. They've grown well and I've been looking forward to the 'tight heads' that the blurb assures me will form 'in autumn and winter, when temperatures are low'.
OK, so it's not exactly cold yet. But there's no sign at all of chicon-like heads. In fact, the plants have done bugger-all for weeks. They don't even look much like the picture on the packet:
Am I being immeasurably dim? Do these plants not even form chicons? Or am I just wretchedly impatient?
Now that's what I call a carrot.
Nice to end 2007 with carrot success. It's eluded me all year, and I hate going into winter without a good stock of basic crops.
We have two 4m rows of these, so there's every chance they'll take us through to spring.
Compost. No subject closer to my heart, especially in autumn when I'm piling material on the heap.
I'm a fan of this compost bin. It's modular, so you can make a new section by sliding planks into the existing uprights. It's also dead easy to assemble. Must be: I'm generally unable to locate my arse with both hands, but this was a doddle.
Not cheap, of course, but then good things aren't. Were this eternal truth recognised by the world's finance directors, I might have spent less of my working life trying to disguise a Mini as a Rolls Royce.
Phew. Something to supplement the beetroot. Not a day too soon.
This is a fair-sized celeriac, given the crappy season we've had. And it only took 8 months to grow. Effortless!
Actually I'd still grow it even if it were 10 times harder to cultivate. I love celeriac, especially raw. Grated and mixed with mustard mayonnaise, it mutates into something exquisitely ambrosial. Seriously: If I could eat only three foods for the rest of my life, it would be on the list (along with freshly cut asparagus in hollandaise sauce and bouillabaisse with crusty bread).
Curses. Now I'm hungry. And it's only 8am.
The asparagus is just beginning to turn yellow. Another few weeks and it will have to be cut back.
When it stopped raining, I finally got some work done on the plot. Pulled out the old sweetcorn stems and dug in some manure.
Wonderful weather on Sunday; it was sunny and warm, but with that beautiful watery light of early autumn. It would have been a perfect weekend had the wife not insisted upon switching to the winter-weight duvet yesterday.
I sweated like a donkey all night and this morning I feel terrible.
